Verdensrommet > ESA

Xenon - a colourless, odourless gas which makes up less than one billionth of the volume of Earth's atmosphere - might hold the key to answer a long-standing question about comets: did they contribute to the delivery of material to our planet when the Solar System was taking shape, some 4.6 billion years ago?

Boosted by natural magnifying lenses in space, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured unique close-up views of the universe's brightest infrared galaxies, which are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than our Milky Way.

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the upper atmosphere of the hot Jupiter exoplanet HAT-P-38b is free of clouds or hazes, whereas most of the atmosphere of WASP-67b — a similar planet in many ways — is masked by high-altitude clouds.

Arianespace has successfully launched two telecommunications satellites: ViaSat-2 for ViaSat Inc.; and EUTELSAT 172B for the operator Eutelsat - which is the first all-electric satellite to be orbited by an Ariane 5.

Zoomed-in view of the crater gouged out by Europe's Schiaparelli Mars lander when it crashed on Oct. 19, 2016. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photo on Nov. 1, 2016. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

More than 700 volunteer citizen scientists have helped identify more than 30,000 celestial objects, including a star explosion that occurred 970 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs emerged on Earth.

These two images, taken a year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, reveal a moon orbiting the dwarf planet 2007 OR10, known informally as “Snow White.” Each image shows the satellite in a different orbital position around its parent body.

NASA's SOHO spacecraft can study the atmospheric layers of the sun that extend off its central body. Total solar eclipses gave humans the first opportunity to see this region of Earth's nearest star. Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO.